Make sure you're too drunk to counter them. The blows seem to never end in deliberate succession. The iron taste of blood enters your mouth. You spring leaks. The precious grunts emanate out of the chords of the man who is violently assuaging your dark desire for justice as he continues to slam his fists into your face and head. Each blow is accompanied by an ironic and painful sounding discharge from your aggressor. But the sounds are not sounds of pain. They are the toxic emanations of hot and furious anger from deep within the chest cavity of your spattered aggressor . You attempt to roll onto your stomach but get trapped halfway by a pivoted knee and then absorb blows to the side of your head, your ear, and the lateral length of your left side where your ribs will soon be cracked like hickory kindling with non-displaced fractures. You make it to your stomach and feel the blows reigning down on the back of your head until fatigue sets magically in, and your killer relaxes, spits down on you, curses you, and walks ostensibly away.
You're not sure he isn't going after the loaded pistol left lying beside the wrought iron patio table, so your pull yourself up and run to your car and drive yourself to the hospital where you refuse to tell the staff anything about the events of that night, portending you got what you wanted, what you needed, even though it would be years until you realized this in clinical terms.
Your blood is drawn, you are admitted for observation, suffering from a menagerie of trauma, including subdural hematoma, and the test results reveal, as predicted, the presence of mass amounts of diazepam and alcohol in your central nervous system. You look at yourself the next morning and cannot fucking believe how violently you have been beaten. A pride begins to swell from within you. You still taste the blood in your mouth and feel the loose end of the stitches against your swollen and lacerated tongue. Your entire body feels unhinged. You think you may be missing a tooth but your tongue is so sore that it cannot circumnavigate the interior of your bloody mouth for proof positive. You're missing your wallet. The blood is caked into your hair with grass and mud. You cannot bathe. It hurts to breathe. To laugh would mean unimaginable pain from your broken ribs. But you laugh anyway, and that brings tears to your eyes and an uninhibited scream within your chest muffled only by your tightly fused molars. You're not allowed to leave the hospital without assistance. Your wife initially refuses to come after you. When she does arrive, your young namesake son looks at the monstrous face beneath which might or might not lie his father's countenance.You have had the goddamn living hell beat out of you.
Now you must go to back work on Monday morning sporting a traumatized placard that was once your face. The silence on the fourteenth floor of the Dominion Tower is palpable even to your traumatized senses that struggle to make sense of the venue, filled with people at their desks, all eyes on you and the merit badges that adorn your once semi-professional face. You return to your desk. You are met there by your compassionate supervisor who realizes that you are not well at all, although you won't neither realize nor accept this fact for several years out. "I got into a fight." It's as simple as that, and yet as complicated as the centuries that prepared the way for it. You have had the goddamn living fucking hell beat out of you. You're better because of it.
